Thursday, August 18, 2011

The Grippe

That's what people used to call the flu. The Grippe. It makes sense because it grabs hold of you and drags you down. I don't know if I caught the full on grippe, but the last 48 hours have left me disconnected from reality. A spaceman on the dark side of the moon. Fever dreams and broken glass in my joints. On Monday I carried 2000 lbs of furniture with my new neighbor. I barely had time to speculate on what a hernia feels like before I was laid low with the grippe.

Two days of twilight sleeping and wet sheets. Sneezing and snotting. Planning how to get to the kitchen and boil water for tea as if it were an endurance event. The bright side is I am closing in on the end of Cloud Atlas which has proven to be the toughest read in my 2011 list of tough reads. A fever should be mandatory for reading this book which respects neither time nor space. It has me looking forward to a little Elmore Leonard.

I think I had the grippe too. Well, something had me in its grip. I listened to that book on tape and I'm not sure I would have stuck with it if I had been reading it with my eyes. It's a good one, but it does jump about in space and time and requires a bit of concentration.